I'm a privacy pragmatist, writing about the intersection of law, technology, social media and our personal information. If you have story ideas or tips, e-mail me at khill@forbes.com. PGP key here.
These days, I'm a senior online editor at Forbes. I was previously an editor at Above the Law, a legal blog, relying on the legal knowledge gained from two years working for corporate law firm Covington & Burling -- a Cliff's Notes version of law school.
In the past, I've been found slaving away as an intern in midtown Manhattan at The Week Magazine, in Hong Kong at the International Herald Tribune, and in D.C. at the Washington Examiner. I also spent a few years traveling the world managing educational programs for international journalists for the National Press Foundation.
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We all know that employers Facebook stalk us before hiring us (or before deciding not to hire us). In an oft-cited survey [pdf] released by Microsoft Research in 2010, 70% of recruiters said they’d rejected applicants based on info they found online. (Kids, that’s why we don’t take photos of ourselves partying in Vegas with strippers, tigers, and illicit drugs.)

Reppler, a start-up that offers a tool for scrubbing your social networking accounts of job-damaging material, recently commissioned a new survey of 300 hiring types to see how they’re using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Craigslist, Tumblr, MySpace, et. al. to screen candidates: 91% of them are doing social networking screens of job applicants. (The other 9% asked if they could use a rotary phone to call their nephews and ask, “What’s a face book?”) At what point do these professional Facebook stalkers turn to the Internetz for a background check? Almost half of them started Googling right after getting an application. The rest of them waited until the hiring process was further along.

Again, 69% of those surveyed say they had at some point rejected a candidate based on what they found there. The most frequent sin committed by the erstwhile job seekers was not drinking (reason for the rejection 9% of the time) or drugs (10%) or having a mutual Facebook friend that the employer thinks is a total skeezeball (0%), but getting caught for lying about their qualifications (13%). Honesty is the best policy, job hunters, especially when there are so many places on the Internet for fact-checking your resumé.

Things to avoid if you're job seeking

Before you go ahead and delete or deactivate your Facebook account, note that Reppler also asked the job granters the converse: how often social networking profiles contributed to a candidate getting hired. Heartening news: That turned out to be the case for 68% of them. What’s the good stuff that will help you score a job? Here’s a nice graphic, courtesy of Reppler:

It's not all bad

It boils down to demonstrated creativity, well-roundedness, and the ability not to tell lies about their educational and professional qualifications. Surprisingly, no one said “Because they looked really hot in their profile photos.”

One of those surveyed did fill in his (or her) own reason: “Because they were Chaste.” “Chastity,” eh? I didn’t realize that nunneries had H.R. recruiters.

Thanks to services like Social Intelligence, the likelihood that employers are going to turn to the Internet as a reference is only going to increase. And expecting them not to is ridunkulous. You probably give a truer sense of yourself and what you’d be like to work with on your Facebook wall than you do in a cover letter. So just as you would censor certain stories about your weekend at the office on Monday morning, make sure to set your privacy settings online such that you broadcast the good stuff publicly and keep the ‘unchaste’ stuff out of employers’ view.

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Some employers have tried crazy things, like requesting applicants’/employees’ social networking passwords. (http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2009/06/19/bozeman-montana-wants-your-facebook-password/) But that’s generally seen as an enormous invasion of privacy that leads to Internet shaming and lawsuits.

Actually there are many people who don’t keep their walls private. We live in a culture that promotes sharing, with companies that love default privacy settings to encourage that sharing.

Your fear that you might be confused with someone else is a valid one. That’s why many privacy experts are pushing for a requirement that employers tell applicants what they found on the Internet that discouraged them from hiring them. So applicants can correct the record if it’s not actually about them (or get the thing deleted before sending out their next round of job applications.)

Even though this IS a good idea, I still don’t believe that having employers check up on you on Facebook is a good idea. is like they decided to go to your neighborhood and see how you behave and who you’re friends with. To the point where qualifications to the job then its ok, but C’mon, having a drink with friends on a friday night after a week long of stress can get you fired, or in this case, not get you the job you want…

Snooping on your FB (one place online where people’s content is geared towards people they know well) is a digital equivalent of coming into your home and going through all your stuff, installing a live webcam and watching you in your home or crashing a private party you weren’t invited to in order to see how you behave. All without your knowledge. Not OK.

Everyone should have locked their FB settings down a long time ago just like you lock the entrance to your home. Also, once in a while go through the list of your friends and delete anyone you don’t know in real life or at least put them on the limited list where they can see only the stuff you share publicly.